Alison Rayner Quintet

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Mark Cherrie Quartet

Matthew Read Trio

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LondonJazz is a not-for profit venture, but may occasionally take on work as a paid publicist and/or sell advertising packages. Where a piece published after 26th October 2012 appears which is linked to this activity, the text will be followed by the following symbol: (pp)

Cheltenham’s Jazz Festival Manager, Phil Woods (himself a trumpeter) was
initially attracted to the music of Dave Douglas by its ‘lyrical
melodic lines, absorbing solo playing and [its] strong modern groove’, and
the US trumpeter’s quintet gig might have been specially crafted to please
him. Douglas mined two albums, the Americana-focused Be Still (its
repertoire including arrangements of folk songs and hymns his mother asked
him to perform at her funeral), and the more recent Time Travel,
for the material performed at this concert, and the resulting music drew
deeply on his trademark strengths: intimacy, seriousness of intent and
scrupulous attention to musicianly values. His own playing is a deeply
personal yet communicative mixture of gentle, insinuating insistence and
rousing – occasionally almost blowsy – vigour and pep, enabling him
carefully to calibrate the music’s tone both for the constantly shifting,
relatively complex (but consistently accessible) features from the latter
(instrumental) album and for the sung material (here performed impeccably
by the affecting, sweet-voiced Heather Masse) from the former
recording. Douglas’s precise, elegant and controlled playing was perfectly
complemented by the pithy, economical, gutsy tenor of Donny
McCaslin, unfussily but tellingly ornamented by pianist Matt
Mitchell, and flawlessly propelled by the crackling drumming of
Jonathan Blake and the consistently impressive (particularly in her
intensely melodic, lithe solos) bass playing of Linda Oh. Folk
songs (both traditional – ‘Barbara Allen’ – and contemporary – Gillian
Welch’s ‘One Morning’) and hymns drew subtly beautiful playing from
all concerned; pieces such as ‘Beware of Doug’ brought driving,
bustling energy to the fore, but whatever mode Douglas’s band were in,
they performed throughout with wit, polish and panache.

Ravi Coltrane produced one of the most heartening successes of
last year with his Blue Note recording Spirit Fiction, and his
band began with one of the album’s stand-out tracks, trumpeter
Ralph Alessi’s ‘Klepto’, a characteristically nervy but
pungent composition, closely followed by a Coltrane original,
‘Word Order’, a relatively complex but pleasantly driving tune
from his album From the Round Box. With Drew Gress on
bass, no band could fail to swing, and pianist David Virelles
and drummer Eric McPherson both provided tense, robust but
sensitive support; slightly mysterious to report, then, that the
quintet’s performance came over as somewhat dry, almost academic in
tone, an impression only confirmed by their choice of Paul Motian’s
typically oblique ‘Fantasm’ as a prelude to their closer,
Monk’s ‘Skippy’ (itself one of the great pianist/composer’s
least accessible, tricksiest tunes, albeit flawlessly negotiated by
Alessi and Coltrane). Dave Douglas, of course, had already shown that
seriousness and virtuosity might be more easily borne, so the
contrast between his gig and Coltrane’s did the latter few favours in
this regard; the venue, too (a creaking, rattling, rustling tent
which allowed extraneous sounds such as ambulance sirens and music
from the festivities going on outside to interfere with the concert’s
quieter passages), worked against him, so that an undeniably tight,
intelligent and cohesive band were not heard to best advantage.

Troyk-estra. 2013 Cheltenham Jazz Festival. Photo credit: Ruth Butler

Troyk-estra, on the other hand, simply bowled their audience
over with their rousing mix of electronica, multi-textured electric
guitar, dance beats and big-band whump and punch. The core trio,
Troyka (keyboardist Kit Downes, guitarist Chris
Montague, drummer Josh Blackmore), have swiftly
established themselves as a leading UK jazz attraction with their
viscerally exciting sound, captured on two Edition albums,
Troyka and Moxxy, and it was with the latter’s opening
track, ‘Rarebit’, that they began this collaboration with an
Academy of Music-centred big band directed by Nick Smart.
Downes self-deprecatingly remarked that the big-band members had
‘roasted us on our own music’, and the four trumpets, four trombones,
five saxophones, vibes and bass guitar that made up Smart’s band did
indeed pack quite a punch, giving the trio’s space noises, guitar-led
scrabbles and quirky funk pieces considerable weight, heft and sheer
presence. Bristlingly propelled by the wonderfully rackety but
precise drumming of Blackmore, though, Troyka’s compellingly varied
compositions (ranging from the controlled, rousing accelerando of
Downes’s ‘The General’ to Gilmore’s quiet dedication,
‘Chaplin’) held their own perfectly, so this was a genuinely
effective collaboration, rather than a trio performance with a big
band tacked on to it.

Mike Gibbs. Cheltenham 2013. Photo credit: Ruth Butler

As anyone who’s ever spoken to Mike Gibbs about his musical
enthusiasms will already know, the Zimbabwean-born composer/arranger
is second to no one in his admiration of Gil Evans, who was
born 100 years ago (13 May 1912). Much of this concert, performed by
a 12-piece band led by pianist Hans Koller, celebrated this
anniversary by concerning itself with music arranged by the great
American, from the Horace Silver classic ‘Sister Sadie’ (from
Out of the Cool), through Kurt Weill’s ‘Bilbao Song’ to
W. C. Handy’s ‘St Louis Blues’ and Monk’s ‘Round
Midnight’, but it also contained Gibbs’s own ‘Tennis,
Anyone?’ (a ravishing encore), and, in any case, bore, like
seaside rock, the Gibbs stamp throughout its length, whatever the
band was playing. Said ‘stamp’, a unique mix of Evans, Messiaen and
others filtered through a sensibility as open to rock and world music
as to Ellington and Basie, is difficult to define, but none the less
immediately recognisable (somewhat like Evans’s own touch) when
heard, and it was unmistakably present throughout this utterly
absorbing concert, which featured not only whip-smart but subtly
evocative ensemble work but also cogent, powerful solo contributions
from Julian Siegel (tenor/soprano/bass clarinet), Mark
Nightingale (trombone) and (especially effective on the Handy
blues) Finn Peters (flute/alto). But you don’t have to take my
word for the classiness of this music; the bassist on this occasion,
Mike Janisch, has recorded it all for immediate release on
Whirlwind Records.

Similarly classy, and infused with the conventional but timeless jazz
values of swing, buoyancy and fluency, was the set performed by vibes
player supreme Gary Burton, whose fleet, chiming delicacy and
robust, intelligent imaginativeness were tellingly complemented by
the faultless playing of guitarist Julian Lage and
effortlessly propelled by a Rolls-Royce rhythm section, bassist
Scott Colley and drummer Antonio Sanchez. The band’s
set was a cultured mix of classics (Mongo Santamaria’s ‘Afro
Blue’, the Rodgers/Hart standard ‘My Funny Valentine’) and
slightly more adventurous in-band originals (Holley’s intriguing
‘Never the Same Way’, Lage’s ‘Sunday’s Uncle’ from the
band’s recent album Guided Tour), but whatever they played
(and Lage was in no manner outshone by his illustrious leader, being
a soloist given to neat but muscular single-note runs that were at
once perfectly judged and delightfully unpredictable) the New Quartet
were exemplary in their control, poise and delicate power.

A glance at the line-up for the early-evening concert in the Big Top
told you everything you needed to know: Mike Stern (guitar),
Bill Evans (saxes, occasional keyboards), Tom Kennedy
(bass) and Dave Weckl (drums) are the definitive fusion band,
the partnership between the frontline pair forged in the Miles Davis
post-comeback 1980s band and continued in the present century in New
Steps Ahead, the rhythm section old sparring partners with an almost
telepathic mutual sensitivity. Stern is simply an unstoppable force,
magnificently verbose, apparently possessed of an insatiable appetite
for soloing, with his uniquely attractive spangly sound, on his own
refreshingly simple themes, both furiously fast and sweetly slow;
Evans is a throaty, tireless grandstander (in the best possible
sense; this music positively demands such a full-on approach) with a
great ear for a catchy tune – and with Weckl and Kennedy tight and
tautly bristling under them, this was ninety minutes of pure
unadulterated pleasure from four masters of the genre. As Evans
commented, pointing at his bandmates: ‘They’re the best at what they
do.’ Amen to that.